DISQUS

The size and composition of federal debt is probably less important than the size and distribution of state/local (municipal) as well as the application, size, and structure of private, especially corporate, debt.



The main problem with composition of the federal debt is that part of it is off-the-books indemnities driving the municipal and corporate debt. This is both a hidden and compounding problem.



Otherwise, foreign holdings of Treasury paper are not a problem, so long as the world is happy holding our paper. Meanwhile, our national debt and deficits are necessary "fixes" -- in the sense of a junky-fix -- to stabilizing employment and growth.



The political problem is our Predator State: That is manifest more as a pattern than an aggregate: It is borrowing and spending that is more than just "out of control", it is "looting".

Milt is the real hero of Charlie Wilson's War.

The irony here was that Carter had both effective energy and military reform policies, bi-partisan ones, in fact, that paid-off for this country about a decade later.



But, he was killed by the bureaucratic, interest-group, legislative, international, and media politics of all of it.



We need sound politics driving sound policies. Sound policies alone, like infantry with no artillery or air, will get cut down.





That is how I am hoping Obama will be different from Carter.

I will post this Thursday at Texas KAOS:



The Texas Plan



It reflects my work with the Texas Democratic Party, the Progressive Populist Caucus, and the Oil Patch Democrats, but strictly my own views.



For immediate relief, I would follow the "infant industry" doctrine of subsidizing both alternative fuels and vehicles. Further, I would revert to common carriage principles of public utility regulation (without public indemnity for private folly).



And, finally, I would move slowly but boldly towards replacement of coal-fired boilers and obsolete reactors for electrical power generation and process-steam applications such as synthesizing clean or renewable fuels.



All of these can be popular policies anywhere but Washington, where propping-up declining industries, Soviet-style indirect taxation and monopoly rent-sharing, as well as Edwardian navalism are still the rule, even after the Great, World, and Cold Wars ended.



That cannot go on, but if Democratic populists cannot change anything, right wing extremists or populists will both generate and exploit the catastrophe it will take to do so after their own fashion.

What comes next?



While Congress argues over which cronies get trickle-down money for huge IT projects that never work, the "next" -- a serious alternative -- is rolling out in cyberspace where there are standards and capital, not just the lies and theft, fraud and debt that legislative sham and patronage consist of.



Virtually every firm of any consequence at the "Web Services" level of technology has agreed to support admiralty-type "Laws of Identity".



So, currently shipping software from Microsoft and Norton, to name a few firms, supports interoperable "infocards" and the cryptographic infrastructure for using them to assert and validate identity as a series of claims. Once integrated in embedded systems like cell phones, auto ignition switches, door locks, and (my favorite) class rings, this technology will be ubiquitous and ... revolutionary.



It will restore provision for personal privacy and collective security to the category of "inalienable" rights that the corrupt, ignorant, but bi-partisan, busybodies in Congress today are oblivious to.

Exploiting non-food bio-fuels or even fuels made from food-grains which are subsidized for some purposes -- feeding cattle and replacing MBTE in poorly-designed vehicles -- but not for other purposes -- grits and tortillas -- takes process steam and other forms of energy, also, in the end, costly and complex, heavy chemical engineering plant. It also takes reliable and efficiently, also uniformly, tariffed facilities for farm-to-market and market-to-plant carriage of feedstock and redistribution of final product.



It is hard to see this happening with the corrupt political and economic institutions associated with our old-fangled "extractive industry" or the new-fangled "financial-egineering" mediated by the "crony" or "mafiya" capitalists of the left or right.

The DNC should determine if one or both candidates violated their "no campaign" pledge and bar any vote for one or both on the first ballot, but otherwise give the MI delegates their proper representation in the national convention.



The conventions are the highest authority in the party and the only institution in the Democratic party (patronage-chain) that is even vestigially egalitarian or majoritarian. It has a party governance role that, of course, the party elite (aristocracy, what the ancien regime called the clerical estate) fear to share with the party bourgeois (pay-their-own-way envelope-stuffers).



Aux armes citoyens, formez les battalions!

Huge OBAMA rallies in Houston and San Antonio today. Actually, CLINTON cronies like Henry CISNEROS are not the same thing as the "Latino" vote.



Texas has various and not homogeneous "Hispanics". "Latino" is a marketing term used by the Jewish owner of Univision -- one of Hillary's NeoCon underwriters.



Mark PENN does not know squat about Texas.



He is a pimp-consultant. He knows where the CLINTON money comes from. Otherwise, he is a fool. The Clinton campaign is an embarrassment to the Clinton supporters here in Texas and joke for the rest of us.



::JRBehrman

Something like this problem of false positives generated by costly attempts to solve a virtually unexamined hypothetical problem is the case w/ warrantless wiretapping.



Both, are huge political legacies of the Cold War: Those include the continuing vindictiveness of the right and the corruption of the left, the use of intelligence to justify bi-partisan concession-tending, and our anglophile, clerical and financial elites' investment in a long-term hire, extra-constitutional military and intelligence establishment.



Neither torture nor warrantless wiretapping were effective prior to 9-11 when all the intelligence necessary to prevent the attack was in hand and readily available to an administration which was, simply, pursuing other matters, undoing whatever progress Clinton might have made dealing with OBL but irritating the Kingdom.



Both torture and wiretapping -- essentially boasted of in public -- were effective after the attack for intimidating Democrats and preventing serious consideration of the political and bureaucratic failures.



Both matters still have corrupt and cowardly Democrats tied in knots, while the young men and women actually fighting our and others' wars short on practical support, as distinct from the self-serving palaver of our ruling elite.

Here in Texas, Democrats and others are taking the sort of serious approach HANSEN recommends, perhaps because we, too, can look at the whole earth from low-orbit, even the moon.



A core concept is integration of complementary technologies. And, a specific example is integrated gasification of coal and sequestration of carbon dioxide.



There is actually a small-scale, non-earmarked, non-political, un-academic, actually practical project here to generate gas from a refinery by-product, called pet-coke, and feed it into an existing coal-fired power-plant. We already inject carbon dioxide into depleted oil reservoirs for tertiary recovery of oil.



This is exactly the sort of economic/engineering replacement called for by Hansen. It is a small step, to be sure, but not the mix of hype and deception that trickles down from Bush or, for that matter, from the Congressional Democrats.



My fear, of course, is that the bond-lawyers and paper-hangers will jump on this, bribe the politicians, and turn a process of trial-and-error engineering progress into just another fad/bubble.



We do not actually have the military-technical or political-economic institutions to address energy problems/solutions with on a large-scale or, more importantly, scalably -- meaning on a logistic curve going from small to large in financially sound increments.



On the contrary, we have state-sponsored Ponzi schemes that both rotten parties jump on, skimming on the upside and shifting on the downside. LTCM/ENRON/SIV ... The Beat Goes On!